Pros

Cons

Doesn't support USB charging.

No 4K DCI video.

Bottom Line

The DJI Mavic Air is the company's smallest, most portable drone, and is just as full-featured as its larger siblings.

Sept. 5, 2019

DJI's first real effort to sell drones to the masses wasn't as rousing a success as you'd expect from the company, which has dominated the marketplace in terms of quality and sales since consumer drones have become a thing. The Spark, released last year, was hamstrung by really short battery life and a control interface that needed some refinement to be ready for mass consumption. The Mavic Air ($919) is what the Spark should have been—foldable, with a 4K camera, and a battery that keeps the drone flying longer. It packs a lot of tech into a small package, including some panoramic photo and video tricks, and is a great option if you don't want to spend $1,149 on our Editors' Choice, the DJI Mavic Pro Platinum.

Editors' Note: The price of the DJI Mavic Air increased from $799 to $919 on September 4, 2019. DJI states that the increase in price is related to tariffs levied by the United States.

Design

The Mavic Air is the smallest drone that DJI makes. Like the Mavic Pro series it folds for storage and transport. When folded it measures 1.9 by 3.3 by 6.6 inches (HWD), small enough to fit into most jacket pockets, and it weighs a little bit less than an iPad, at 15.2 ounces. After it's unfolded and ready to fly it measures 2.5 by 7.2 by 6.6 inches. You can buy it in an Arctic White, Flame Red, or Onyx Black finish.

Unlike the Spark, a remote control is included in the base package. But you don't need to use it—the Mavic Air can be flown with hand gestures or with your smartphone. As with any drone, you'll get smoother, more pleasant manual control when flying with the remote, as well as extended operating range. DJI says the Mavic Air has a 2.5-mile control range with the remote, but just 262 feet when flying with a smartphone. I didn't fly it that far away, but had no problems with the video feed or control at an 1,800-foot distance in testing.

The remote is similar to the one you get with the Mavic Pro Platinum, but like the Air, it's smaller. The control sticks detach for storage and there's no information LCD. It has clips to hold a smartphone at the bottom, so you can fly with the sticks and enjoy a first-person view from the drone's nose-mounted camera. The housing for the phone is tight, so you'll have to take your device out of its case in order to get it to fit. The cable to plug in your phone is detachable—DJI includes Lightning, micro USB, and USB-C cables.

The battery installs in the bottom of the chassis, rather than the top, a departure from the Mavic Pro Platinum. Unlike the Spark, you can't charge it via USB, you need to use the included charger, which also replenishes the remote's internal battery. If you need extra batteries, consider buying the $999 Fly More bundle. It includes everything in the base package, plus two extra batteries, a power hub to simplify recharging, and three sets of propellers (the standard package includes two sets).

DJI says the Air is good for about 21 minutes of flight time on a fully charged battery. Its stated flight times are always a bit optimistic. In our test flights, the Air averaged about 18 minutes per battery, and when you consider that you'll need to give yourself a good half-minute to take off and get going, and another minute or so to ensure a safe landing, the actual useful flight time is a little bit less. It's still a lot better than the Spark, which netted just 12 minutes, but not on the same level as the Mavic Pro Platinum, which delivers 28 minutes. If you're a fan of longer flights, and considering the Fly More Bundle, it's worth it to spend a little bit more and go with the Mavic Pro Platinum instead.

The Air has 8GB of internal memory and a USB-C port to offload files to a computer. It also has a standard microSD slot, with support for microSDHC and microSDXC media. The internal memory is only good for about 10 minutes of 4K video, so you'll probably still want to use a memory card for trips and longer flights. But it's nice to have internal storage available for those times when you forget a memory card.

DJI frequently pushes out firmware updates, which can be a pain for infrequent flyers. You'll (usually) be able to fly without updating the firmware, but it's good practice to check for an update and top off any batteries the night before a planned flight. Firmware updates are performed via your smartphone and usually take between 15 and 30 minutes to complete. In the three months we had the Mavic Air on hand for review, there were two firmware updates pushed out by DJI.

Flight Modes

Like other DJI drones, the Air is equipped with both GPS and GLONASS satellite positioning. They pinpoint its location on the globe, enabling automated and semi-automated flight modes, as well as steady hovering and the important return-to-home safety feature. The location detection also enforces no-fly zones. There are a number of warning levels, some of which you can override if you're authorized to fly, and others that can't be overridden—the airspace around Washington DC, for example. If you're concerned about flying where you live, check out DJI's interactive map before you buy a drone.

There are a number of ways to control the drone. It supports the same gesture controls—DJI calls it SmartCapture—as the Spark. Wave your hand and the drone will take off the from the ground and follow its movements. You don't need the remote, or even your phone, to start SmartCapture—just press the button on the rear of the Air twice after powering it on to enable gestures. SmartCapture is limited to 1080p, but you can set the frame rate using the DJI Go 4 app, with standard options from 24 through 60fps available.

The control system has some extra functions, including the ability to tell the drone to move farther away from you in order to get a wider shot—it will move up to 19 feet away from the person controlling it. You can start a video by making a picture frame gesture in front of your face—the Mavic will track your movements as long as it's recording. You can also snap a still image by making a V sign with your index and middle finger. The drone's front lights will flash to let you know that it's going to snap the shot, so you won't always look like Winston Churchill flashing a victory sign in your aerial selfies.

You've also got a modicum of movement control with gestures too. Moving your hand up and down, with the palm facing out, control altitude, while you can move the drone toward or away from you by holding both hands out in front of you and bringing them closer together or farther apart. Landing the drone is a matter of holding your hand out with your palm facing the ground.

Phone control is available via the DJI Go 4 app, for Android and iOS. (Like other DJI drones, the Mavic Air has an open SDK, so third-party app control will come in the future.) If you just use your smartphone you'll be limited in operating range, and you'll need to use on-screen control sticks for manual flight. I'm not a fan of phone control in general, as the tactile feedback you get from real sticks makes smoother manual flight possible. But if you leave the remote at home, or if it's out of juice, it lets you get up in the air and grab a shot.

Using the phone by itself is better suited for the automated flight modes. The Mavic Air has pretty much everything DJI has cooked up included. That means it can track a subject using the ActiveTrack system—just draw a box around what you want to follow on the phone screen and it will keep it centered in frame. It also supports TapFly, the mode that lets you fly simply by tapping on your phone's screen. See something interesting? Tap it, and the Mavic Air will fly toward it.

And it supports QuickShots, first seen in the Spark. These automated camera shots move the drone through the air in a predetermined pattern. You get Rocket (an upward flight with a downward-facing camera shot), Dronie (a back-and-up reveal shot), Circle (an orbit around a point in space), and Helix (a corkscrew orbit). New to the Mavic Air are Asteroid, shown above, a reveal that combines some video with a Little Planet style image, and Boomerang, a reveal that flies away from and around you before circling back home.

Even with forward and rear obstacle detection, you should take extreme care with some of the QuickShots. Understand that the drone will be flying itself, and if you don't correctly judge your surroundings these automated paths can lead to a collision. I had trouble finding an area open enough to safely perform the Helix, for example. Asteroid is the safest bet, as the Air stays in place during the entire shooting sequence, and it's easy to judge if you are clear above for a Rocket shot or ahead for a Dronie.

Finding the shots in the app takes a little work—you've got to click on an icon in the app and drill down to get to them. And they're not the most intuitive to get started. I struggled a bit to get the Asteroid mode going, not realizing that I needed to draw a box with my fingers on the phone screen first. Once I figured it out, it was easy, but some additional on-screen guidance would be nice.

Finally, you can simply pick up the remote control and fly the drone manually, the old-fashioned way. The Mavic Air will fly at 17.9mph with obstacle avoidance enabled, or at up to 42.5mph in Sport mode, a mode in which the obstacle detection system is disabled. Sport flying is a lot of fun, but you want to do it in a wide, open area free of obstacles. It's easily accessed via the remote—the toggle switch is at the center, between the two control sticks.

The Mavic Air's obstacle detection and avoidance system is better than what we've seen in previous drones. It has forward, downward, and rear sensors, so you can fly backward with more confidence. The front sensors leverage the new Advanced Pilot Awareness System (APAS). Instead of simply stopping in place when they detect an obstacle blocking the drone's path, the Mavic Air examines the environment and automatically adjusts flight to avoid it, either by flying to the side or rising above it.

I tested APAS at a local park, flying low to the ground under a canopy of trees. Switching the system on does slow the Mavic considerably—it didn't exceed 3mph in our testing. But the system works as advertised. I tried to fly the Air directly into both tree trunks and myself, and each time it averted the course on its own, changing the angle approach just enough to avoid a crash. It's not perfectly intelligent—a wide swath of low-hanging, skinny branches stalled the drone in its tracks, but the only way to avoid hitting them would have been to make a 90-degree turn, well out of the view of the Air's lens and obstacle sensors.

Video and Imaging

Despite its size, the Mavic Air has a 4K camera, mounted in the nose and stabilized using a three-axis gimbal. It captures smooth, high-quality video at up to 4K UHD resolution at 24, 25, or 30fps with 100Mbps compression. It also supports 2.7K at standard frame rates up to 60fps, and 1080p and 720p at up to 120fps. There is no support for the wider 4K DCI standard, as you get with the Mavic Pro Platinum and Phantom 4 series.

Even so, video quality is strong. The camera's three-axis gimbal steadies video, so it's silky smooth even when making turns and changing altitutde. The lens captures crisp footage, backed with a high 100Mbps bit rate with H.264 compression. The Air does not support the more modern, efficient HEVC/H.265 codec, currently supported by the larger Phantom 4 Pro and high-end Inspire 2.

For still imaging, the camera is 12MP, using a similar 1/2.3-inch CMOS sensor paired with a 24mm f/2.8 (full-frame equivalent) prime lens. You can capture photos in Raw (DNG) format, or in JPG. If you shoot in JPG you'll have the option to enable HDR capture, to better emphasize highlights and shadows in scenes with mixed lighting. The image above is a Raw capture, processed in Lightroom, and the shot below is an out-of-camera JPG shot in HDR mode. The images were taken minutes apart.

There's also a stitched Panorama mode, the first one we've seen in a DJI drone. The Mavic Air rotates about its axis to capture a series of photos, stitching them together into a wide shot. You can shoot a three-shot vertical pano, a nine-shot horizontal, or a 21-shot 180-degree image. There's also a spherical mode, which captures 25 photos, to simulate the effect you get with 360-degree cameras.

Shooting panoramas can be a little problematic. The drone has serious issues with exposure when shooting scenes with varying levels of brightness, like the spherical sunrise panorama above. (It does a better job on overcast days, or shots captured when the sun is higher in the sky.) Subject movement is also a concern—something you always deal with when stitching multiple exposures together. If there's motion near a stitch point lines can blur. This is definitely a 1.0 implementation—hopefully DJI can improve it with future firmware updates. There is plenty of resolution and detail in the final results; the full spherical panoramas boast 33.5MP of resolution.

Conclusions

The Mavic Pro showed us that small drones can be just as capable as larger ones. The Mavic Air aims to take things one step further, putting a powerful aircraft and 4K camera into a form factor you can slide into a large pocket. It doesn't have the same type of battery life as the Mavic Pro Platinum, which netted 28 minutes in our tests, but aside from that, there aren't many compromises made to achieve the delightfully small form factor.

It does a few things that the pricier Mavic Pro and Pro Platinum don't, including automatic navigation around obstacles, panoramic images, and gesture controls. You also get QuickShots (the Mavic Pro series does a few of these, like Orbit, but omits the newer modes that we first saw in the Spark) and rear obstacle avoidance.

The Mavic Air is what the Spark should have been—foldable, with a bundled remote, gesture controls, and battery life that doesn't make you feel hurried every time you want to get an aerial shot. But it's also significantly more expensive. The Spark debuted at $499, but it's now selling for closer to $300 on its own and at around $550 when bought with a couple of spare batteries and a remote.

That puts the Mavic Air, at $799 on its own or at $999 when bought with a pair of spare batteries, in a tough spot. Casual pilots will be lured by the Spark's low cost, even if its battery doesn't keep it flying long. Pros are likely to spend more on the Mavic Pro—currently selling for around $850—or the Pro Platinum ($1,099), especially if DCI video and longer flying times are priorities. The Mavic Air, the proverbial middle child in DJI's small drone family, is certainly a better performer than the low-cost Spark, and goes toe-to-toe with the pricier Mavic Pro in most respects, with the exception of flight time.

Everything else falls into place—the small size, stability, and imaging and video quality are just as good as you get with the pricier Pro Platinum. If you think you'll be happy spending around 18 minutes in the air at a time, the Air is a strong value prospect. But we're still recommending the Mavic Pro Platinum as our Editor's Choice for small drones. It costs more, but it flies for a good ten minutes longer per charge.

About the Author

Senior digital camera analyst for the PCMag consumer electronics reviews team, Jim Fisher is a graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he concentrated on documentary video production. Jim's interest in photography really took off when he borrowed his father's Hasselblad 500C and light meter in 2007.

He honed his writing skills at retailer B&H Photo, where he wrote thousands upon thousands of product descriptions, blog posts, and reviews. Since then he's shot with hundreds of camera models, ranging from pocket point-and-shoots to medium format digital cameras. And he's reviewed almost all of them. When he's not testing cameras and gear for PCMag, he's likely out and about shooting with … See Full Bio